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"We realized that women are not just important at the family level but also in the economic area. Women are present in the economy. They make a contribution to the wealth of the nation and to the GNP."
-- Sonia Agurto (FIDEG), Managua, 2000

"Racism is taking the place of pornography."
-- Jim Goad (James, 208)

Having heard so many negative things from the western media about North Korea, I approached my trip to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) with great misgivings. What could I learn in this "Stalinist theme park"-as the BBC called it? What of the gulags? Were people starving? Was an internal revolt imminent? The one thing of which I was certain was that I wanted to see the situation first-hand, a thought reinforced by my first encounter with the North Korean sponsors of our trip during meetings in Beijing.

In a circle under the trees at the dismantled women's tent at the close of the January 2003 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, some 30 feminist leaders representing regional and international networks from around the world gathered to evaluate their impact on that global gathering of activists. In 2003, Latin American feminists, who have been outspoken voices on the WSF International Committee, assumed responsibility for the planning of key plenaries at the WSF only to discover that these events were physically marginalized while attention turned to big-name speakers.

This paper discusses some of the issues that women's movements and feminist scholarship have had to grapple with over the last three decades. I also discuss some of the many underlying factors that have impinged on feminist activism and have therefore informed it.

For decades the Swedish Model was taken as the model of welfare state capitalism. This model, based on a commitment to full employment, centralized wage bargaining, and the principle of universalism, raised Sweden to the position of leader in welfare state politics. However, recent threats from external factors, such as globalization and Europeanization (in the form of the European Union), and internal factors, such as the abandonment of the core principles of the Swedish Model and a turn towards neoliberalism, have led to changes in the Swedish welfare state.

Along with critical legal theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger and others, this essay argues that the institutional and imaginative orders of U.S. society are limited by the legal apparatuses in ways that make social justice difficult to achieve. The very legal norms that are proclaimed to be just, fair, and self-evident work in less visible ways to discourage alternative thinking about the structure of society and the feasibility of more inclusive social and economic communities.

There is general agreement on the Left that ‘globalization’ is causing devastating consequences including rising inequality, poverty, polarization, and militarization. There is equal agreement that globalization poses a strategic dilemma to those interested in a progressive and socially just alternative to these processes. But there is little agreement on what this alternative strategy should look like. Many (feminists or otherwise) argue that because capitalism has become globalized, forms of resistance must follow suit.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of some of Marx's methodological insights for thinking about feminist issues and politics in the context of globalization. In the short space available here, I want to set down some general observations.